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Stuart Preston has just started an new UK ALM User Group, to quotes its blurb… The UK ALM User Group is for practitioners of Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) and Software Development Lifecycle (SDLC) in the UK to get together and discuss and share ideas tools and techniques, as well as to socialise somewhere other than Agile and Software Development conferences! Practitioners and enthusiasts from all disciplines are welcome. Membership is free. Please feel free to invite your UK based ALM network. ...

You can now vote for the proposed sessions at the upcoming DDD8 conference, and what a good selection there is to choose from this time.

There seams to be loads of coverage at present over mobile platforms. Maybe I am just noticing it due to coverage of the CES show and the launch of the Nexus One, but the more mainstream media does seems to be taking a good deal of interest in the future of smartphones (or superphone as Google are calling their new one). All the articles seems to Apple Vs. Android (and moving rapidly towards Apple Vs. Google). There is also usually a passing mention of Blackberry, then a ‘wonder where Nokia are?’ but usually very little on Microsoft. The article in this months UK edition of Wired is a classic example. ...

The AGM is on the 14th Jan at the Victoria Hotel, 28 Great George St, Leeds. See here for directions. Come along and let us know the direction you would like the user group to follow.

There is a new user group starting up in the North East. It is taking an interestingly route of having meetings with two one hour sessions, one targeted at developers and the other for IT pros. The user group is free and there will be food and giveaways, I like this idea, the danger with too many user groups is that they focus too much on their own little area; getting in some cross fertilisation between people with different views on problems is a great way to learn more. ...

Like the Queen, I have recorded a Christmas message this year. Now I have no prior knowledge of what her Majesty will speak about this year, but I will lay good odds it is not about using Typemock Isolator. On the Typemock site you will find a short video on how we at Black Marble make use of Isolator to tackle testing problems that do no lean themselves to traditional mocking patterns. ...

There any many good document on how to migrate a TFS server from it’s default ports of 8080 (tfs) and 80 (Sharepoint/Reports) to 8443 and 443, usuall to allow Internet access. A good place to start is Aaron Block’s post on the subject I did find a problem whist sorting this on a system today, this was that although we had modified all the services to operate on the SSL secured ports the vaious TFS team project WSS sites were still trying to access reports on http://servername/reports not the new https://tfs.mydoman.com/reports url. The reason for this was that the tfsredirect.aspx cache needed to be cleared, WSS did not know we had updated the server. ...

I am a bit behind the curve here but if you have not noticed DDD8 is planed for January in Reading and DDD Scotland in Glasgow for May. Both conferences have open calls for speakers, so get your sessions in quick.

It is time again for Agile Yorkshire. This month the meeting is a usual the second wednesday in the month, but at a different venue - Old Broadcasting House (http://www.ntileeds.co.uk/old-broadcasting-house/) The session is on Kaban For Software Engineering by David Joyce and Peter Camfield from BBC Worldwide, as lean seems all the rage at present this should be very interesting. Hope to see you there

The interest in Visual Studio 2010 is growing, I am presenting at two events this week and have another day of less formal meetings on the subject. The event on Thursday is the [Architecture Forum in the North](Architecture Forum in the North) we are hosting with Microsoft, there are still a few spaces available is if you are interested in the learning more about new techniques and tools why not come along. You even get to hear me talking about using TFS as a Java developers via Teamprise. ...